Are you by any chance suggesting that eternal (in human perception) doesn't mean eternal (in God's perception)
Yes.
God is not a 'thing' as other things are; God is not a 'person' as other persons are; God cannot be categorised or classified, other than to say God is uniquely a category to itself.
People talk of 'thinking outside the box' which, although its exact origin is obscure, most likely, is a piece of nonsense spun by 'creative' or 'management consultants' in the 70s – believe me, I worked in ad agency creative departments in the 70s – it simply means 'come up with something outside the normal stuff that springs to mind. The 'box' is, of course, the scope of one's own imagination.
The French philosopher Maurice Murleau-Ponty said, in
The Phenomenology of Perception, that to perceive something is 'to be able to make a tour of it'. And how is that possible when we speak of God?
So kataphatic theology (negative theology – God is beyond our capacity to perceive or to know) counter-balances apophatic theology (positive theology – we can make predicative statements regarding the Divine – "God is love" 1 John 4:8, or "God is spirit" John 4:34. And then, of course, every tradition has its liturgical affirmations. We call them Litanies, about the nature of God. They're endless.)
Also, how about Skull's interpretation of the Greek word 'kolasin'?
It's a subtle misconception, whether intentional or not I have no idea. in this case it would seem to demonstrate how modern Theosophists 're-imagine' definitions to suit their
a priori concepts.
Let me explain.
The Koine Greek word
kolasis derives from the Classical Greek verb
kolaso, which means "to prune, to cut off."
Note: It does not mean "to make it more fruitful", that's been appended to the meaning of the term, and has no foundation in any Greek text.
So I'm afraid Skull has assumed something is cut off 'to make it more fruitful', but that is not the case at all.
The key verse is Matthew 25:46
"And these shall go into everlasting punishment: but the just, into life everlasting."
kai houtos aperchomai eis aiōnios kolasis de dikaios eis zōē aiōnios
There are several problems with asserting that
kolasis should be properly translated "cutting off", because of its relationship with
kolazo. To determine the meaning of a word by its derivation is an example of an "etymological fallacy." Words may or may not share semantic range with their etymological forebears. In many cases, they do not.
An example: the word 'nice' means someone or something is pleasant to the senses. In common usage, it can be used sarcastically to mean its opposite, as when we say 'that's nice' meaning it's not at all pleasant ...
... but check
this out. Originally, the word meant "foolish, stupid, senseless"!
So you have to read the term in context, and also check out how it is used in the culture that uses it.
Let's look at the text.
it says 'these' shall go away into everlasting cutting-off-ness. The next word is 'but', and it's a big 'but', because it says "but the just into life eternal", so to be cut-off everlastingly is to
not go into eternal life.
If not 'life', then 'death' – and that would make sense because God sustains all life, even the sinner's life, even though God does not cause nor sustain sin.
Now, here's the repayment of a debt to Will. He was the first here to raise the point that sin is the translation of the Greek term
harmatia, the root of which is from the Ancient Greek, meaning 'error' or "failure". It's primitive root is the verb hamartanō: "to miss the mark".
But it took on the meaning of 'error' or 'failure', and specifically a moral error of moral failure, in later Greek, such as in Aristotle's "
Poetics, when he discusses the moral flaws of the hero in the Tragedies, the plays in which the hero comes to ruin.
It can range from ignorant, mistaken, or accidental wrongdoing to deliberate iniquity, error, or sin.
Macbeth, for example. The play opens with Macbeth snatching defeat from the jaws of victory; he is feted as a hero by the King, but murders him to achieve his ambitions, and is in turn killed by the King's son and heir.
So by the time the Gospels were written,
harmatia suited the scribe as the term used to infer 'sin' and not, as some hope to argue, mistaken innocence. It's dogmatically defined that to be a 'sin' requires the free and informed act of the will to do (or not to seek to prevent) that which we know to be wrong.
Example: You friend asks you to lend him $500 dollars to get out of trouble. You do. He uses the money to pay a hit-man to kill the man he owes $5,000. If you knew that's what he was going to do, then you are his accomplice, as guilty of murder, so is he, so is the assassin. If you didn't know, you are not guilty.
Now, here is something of a reversal:
Harmatia in the classical sense means 'to miss the mark', which infers an act which goes awry, in the same way that the arrow, fired at the target, goes off course and misses.
God can't sin, because God can't miss the mark. God is (to us) what God wills, and God wills what He is. What is there for Him to will [o]with[/i], that is not of Himself? (Note I say '
of Himself', God does not will Himself as 'this' or 'that', there is n 'this' or 'that' in God, there's just ... God. To say otherwise is pantheism or panentheism, which is an anthropomorphism.)
God is the cause of my being. God sustains my being. The form that being takes is, to all appearances, entirely contingent. I am a human being because I was born of human beings. I look just like my dad. My dan, yada yada ...
I am not a thing that acts, or rather, I am, but the first
act is my very being. My being
at all is God's act of bringing being 'out of nothing' (
ex nihilo). My parents getting together etc., is just the subsequent contingent means, that's just the physicality of it all, but God created Creation first.
So my being is not appended to something, any more than the soul is something appended to, or 'mysteriously' inside of, my body. This body is this soul's presence in the world. Without a body, the soul is not 'fully' present. Angels are fully present as incorporeal beings. We are superior to angels in that we possess both incorporeality and corporeality; angels are superior to us because they are perfectly what they are.
Another digression, I'm afraid. Angels are perfect because they are absolutely what they are, they are 'fully realised' beings. They have no potential to be more than they are, and each angel is absolutely the perfection of what it is. So, as St Thomas proved, every angel is its own
species. We might see, for example, Michael, Gabrael, Rafael and so forth as Arch Angels, and therefore belong to that
species ... oh Lord ... stop these digressions!
Back to the plot.
I am my soul. No, I am soul. The What and Who and How and When and Where of this soul in the vast web of creation is how this soul appears. My ears and nose and fingers and toes might not be all that I am or my soul is, but my whole soul is in my ears and nose and fingers and toes, and they are 'mine', they are as much 'me' as any other
part of 'me' ... but the thing that says 'I' rises from the very depths of my being, and that depth is one, and single. It is me, and no other ...
(OK, maybe now you begin to see why I find the idea of reincarnation, at the level of 'me', unsustainable?)
Perhaps it's better to think of incorporeal 'essence' rather than the substantial 'soul'. I say substantial because we tend to think of the soul as a 'thing', whereas the soul is this being's essential 'is-ness', it's not a thing that inhabits a thing. It is the thing.
Quantum Physics proves it. There cannot be multiple instance of Tadashi in time, any more than there can be multiple instance of Tadashi in space, that is, simultaneously, any number of Tadashi's, right here and right now. Only you occupy the space you occupy. A Tadashi 'over there' would be an
entirely different being, because that Tadashi is located somewhere else in space, and, necessarily, somewhere else in time – somewhere else in creation – and by virtue of that, would be a different person altogether.
Quantum Physics argues that there in fact are an infinite number of Tadashi's,
simultaneously present, each in its own universe, which is itself as distinct from every other as Tadashi is.
I believe creation is constantly creating, but never reproduces the same particular thing, our finitude renders that impossible. So the only thing that can manifest again and again, infinitely, must itself be infinite ... and I would argue that is God and God alone ... but God does not manifest Himself, He causes being
in continuum, He is Creation all the time (as we see it), He is in every moment; every moment is the 'light' of His
causation, whilst the 'light' of His own is-ness – incomparable different (and yet so close! Augustine said, 'You are more me than I am myself') – to our own apparently fragmented being ('me' being the composite of my body, my spirit, my soul, my mind, yada yada ... ), is 'beyond the veil'.
Here, at last, my point ...
... God cannot fail. What it to prevent Him? He possesses no 'flaw' that would lead Him to miss the mark.
If God made man 'perfectly', so that his every action was ordered towards the good and the good alone (which only God knows), we would have no choice in the matter.
Man, patently, can fail. He can miss the mark. He can sin. So God is the cause of our
free actions (as opposed to those actions that are not free, and are 'locally' and subsequently determined by contingency), but God does not give rise to sin if our acts are sinful. He cannot, because He is Absolute, and absolutely what He is; he does not will that which He does not will. It sets up a preposterous proposition.
Man does, but not God. Or rather, in ignorance or culpability, he displays the tendency to will towards his own good rather than what he knows instinctively to be the right thing to do.
And thus, for reasons of his own moral weakness or laxity, he misses the mark.
And thus is punished by his own sin. And sin cannot be in God.
The bit that Skull sees as God 'pruning the tree to make it more fruitful' 'misses the mark', to coin a phrase, in that the point of the verse is clear. there is the healthy tree (the just) and the deadwood (the unjust) ... which is burnt.
Lastly, Greek lexicography shows that, even in classical times,
kolasis began to take on the meaning of 'chastisement' or 'punishment', in Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato.
But you also suggested that hell is empty... and there are three speculations I can make from what you have said in your posts.
1. Hell is empty because the condemn souls would simply dissipate into thin air. (your post #84)
Yes.
2. Hell is empty because when Jesus went to hell himself, he bailed out everyone. (your post #98)
Yes.
And does he repeat doing this time after time to keep hell empty??
Yes. God is a continuum, a dynamism, God is not a one-time event.
3. Hell is empty because no one ever goes there. No one says "No thanks I don't want to see Him" at the Pearly Gates. (your post #126)
I'd like to think not.
Christianity teaches that we are all God's children and we are all family, does it not? Thus, I am not giving up on any of my brothers' or sisters' souls...
Nor is God. God never gives up.
But there is nothing else to sustain the soul if it rejects God's gift of its is-ness ... we have that choice, and it is a choice because it is the ultimate free act, to reject that which underpins our very being. It's the absolute rejection of one's own being. It's is self-extinction.
And the love I feel for them can only come from the Love God emanates Himself, because He is 'the source' of all Love. So if I feel strong enough love for every one of my brothers and sisters on earth that I don't want to lose not even one of them, why not Him?! My feeling of love could only come from what He feels (and His Love must be thousands of times stronger than mine), so it is a natural conclusion for me to draw that it's not only what I want, it's what He wants too!
Yes, but God does not
force us to love ... so we are free to reject love, even His.
I have to sleep now ... can I ask that your question on 'Christian Universalism' waits?
